Chapter Five
“I’ll wake up when the nightmareis over.”
—Oliver Masters
mia.
IT HAD ONLY been a week since Ollie’s return, and already he’d proven I could hate him. He warned me this would happen, as if his forwardness would have prepared my paper heart. It would have been easier if he just stayed away. Luckily, classes kept me occupied, and Ollie kept to himself.
Knowing he was within touching distance, talking distance—within distance, period—didn’t help. Three times a day, I’d seen him throughout the week. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I felt his eyes on me as if he were watching me from across the room from his old table with Maddie, Gwen, and Jude. But each time my eyes drifted, all I’d ever catch was the side of his face.
“So, I’m thinking we should get together in the woods. It will be like old times,” Bria announced as soon as she sat down across from me on Friday morning in the mess hall. “Think of it as awelcome-home-Ollie-get-together.”
“No, I don’t think that’s such a great idea,” I stated.
Jude’s mysterious behavior turned Bria utterly smitten with him, and the get-together had nothing to do with Ollie. The smile on her face when she looked at Jude told me so. All Bria wanted was to get Jude in the woods, and though I’m not a cock block, I didn’t know which side of Ollie would show up, or if he would show up at all.
“We need something to cheer us up,” she whined, turning to see Jude at the same table Ollie sat at.
My gaze followed hers until my eyes landed upon Ollie once again. He looked the same in his black jeans, faded tattoos, and dirty-brown chaotic hair, though his smile was different and his eyes never found me like they used to. Some moments, I’d swore I’d caught a glimpse of the old him, as if a light bulb went off inside his head. But mainly he paid no attention as if our time together never existed.
Since he pushed me into Ethan, he hadn’t made an effort to talk to me. Ollie was back to his medicated self, and I’d rather him be gone than see him like this. At least with him gone, I could imagine the old him and the memories we shared.
“Mia?” My attention moved away from Ollie and back to Bria. She stared at me from across the table with her black brow in the air. Her expression transformed when she noticed mine, and a sigh escaped from her lips. “You don’t have to go.”
Bria needed this.
“I’m going,” Tyler piped up from beside me. “I’ve never gone to one of your get-togethers before. Should be interesting.”
Tyler never witnessed the nightly parties I suffered through. She never met Isaac, never met Stanley, had never known the old Ollie, or the old me for that matter. At this point, I missed the former me. Not caring and no heart. “I’ll go,” I uttered through a sigh, wrapping my rebellious lock of hair around my index finger, pretending all was right in the world I lived in. “Just no games.”
“No games? Do you know who you’re talking to?” Bria laughed and pushed out her chair as she stood. Her black pixie hair grew into a short bob, and it swayed as she walked over to Ollie’s new table and leaned over, surely informing the four of them of today’s get-together.
“And she’s back,” I moaned.
A recent storm brought a tree down at our old spot in the woods. Bria sat beside Jude on the broken tree while the rest of us grouped over the ground. Jake’s hands thread through Tyler’s blonde hair, finishing off a French braid, whilst Ollie sprawled out along the leaves with his hands behind his head, looking up into the sky beside Maddie.
The late morning August sun filtered through the branches, raising the cold temperature a few notches. Brisk winds blew scarcely, reminding me summer was over and it was only going to get colder from this point forward. Between the constant rain and location of Guildford, it rarely reached temperatures over seventy degrees, even through the summer. A commotion from Ethan and Jerry breaking up a fight during a ritual poker game took place a couple of yards away, filling our background noise.
“Ya finally gonna tell us your story?” Maddie asked Jude, breaking the silence. I wondered if the other’s felt the disconnection in the air, or if it was just me.
Jude brought one leg up on the tree, his knee poking through the hole in his black jeans. “Nope.”
“Probably an addict,” Ollie muttered with his eyes glued to the sky, speaking the first words since we’d come out here. His statement only confirmed my Ollie was gone. “Pill poppin’ addict,” he followed slowly, popping the P’s and tugging my heartstrings.
“No, I know an addict when I see one,” Bria said beside Jude. “You don’t have to say anything.” She flashed him a small smile, and Jude gave her a sideways glance before looking back out in front of him. Jude was a walking contradiction. The fact I couldn’t quite figure him out yet annoyed me.Was he into Bria? Was he notinto Bria?
Ollie lifted himself on his elbows. “Alright, this is boring. I have better things to do than sit around and watch the fruit loop braid hair.”
“Hey,” Jake whined. “What’s your deal?”
Ollie shook his head. “How about a game, yeah? Power? Strip or Dare?”
“You don’t like games,” I reminded him, ripping a leaf in half.
Ollie’s gaze fell over me, his green eyes dim and narrow. His head tilted to the side. “You don’t get to talk to me,” he said with a finger lifted in my direction.
Pretending his words didn’t hit me like a tornado, I trained my eyes and fingers back on the leaf, ripping into smaller pieces. No matter how many seconds passed, I was still wrapped up in the cyclone of his sentence. Spinning and spinning and …
